Artforum International

An international contemporary art magazine covering sculpture, painting, mixed media, and installation works, as well as architecture, music, and popular culture. Includes artist interviews and reviews of individual artists and/or galleries; reviews of fi

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Articles from Vol. 46, No. 2, October

When we use the phrase "like watching paint dry," it's typically to register our impatience with the leisurely unfurling of some event over which we have no control. But recently, as I looked at Alex Hay's new paintings, the phrase came to mind in...

IT IS TEMPTING TO SAY that with the sad news of Bernd Becher's death in June at age seventy-five we have seen the passing of an era. Curator Emma Dexter, writing in The Independent, memorialized the artist's contribution by describing the photographic...

For more than three decades filmmaker Babette Mangolte has documented, in still and moving images, the performances of artists and dancers, from her early chronicling of the work of Yvonne Rainer to her recording of Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces...

Thanks to a stretch of skylights, Rivington Arms is an atypically bright gallery, and in the glare of the afternoon sun, Christian Denzler's nine new untitled drawings looked initially like nothing more than a row of large white sheets of paper set...

A museumworthy show presented as a gallery two-hander, "Circa 70: Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois" joined recent exhibitions like "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" and "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" in inviting audiences...

Atomic clocks, first developed in 1949 in the United States, regulate universal time according to the resonance of atoms. The frequency of these fundamental particles, often of cesium or rubidium, creates a simple motion analogous to that of a sonic...

Using perhaps the most appropriate method imaginable for the making of a summer show, Davide Cantoni produced the works in his recent debut outing at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery with the help of a classic childhood stunt: burning paper by using a magnifying...

WHERE QUESTIONS OF MEDIUM and making are concerned, most art criticism seems patently uninterested in (if not fundamentally incapable of) dealing with issues of production. Why obsess over the stuff of MFA curricula and fabrication trade manuals, goes...

THE HIGHEST ART in architecture today is the building of homes for art. Museums are currently where we see design with clarity, making us conscious of where we are. Here not only is the act of building usually sufficiently liberated from economic constraints,...

WHEN I FIRST SAW Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982), I felt that I was watching a newsreel of consciousness. It is a film that stands alone as a literary document in the medium of cinema, layering intellectual and historical labor and play into a sublimely...

The exhibition "Blow-up 1952-2007: Quand j'etais petit je ne faisais pas grand" (When I Was Little I Didn't Work Big) featured eleven paintings by Francois Morellet from 1952 and their copies, made in 2006, four times larger in height and width. The...

"GIVEN THE FINE ARTS, architecture, painting, and sculpture, I feel caught in the middle," Frank Stella said recently. For anyone with a passing knowledge of the work he has made over the course of the past fifty years, the statement is hardly surprising;...

It perhaps should come as no surprise that Haim Steinbach's practice has seemed increasingly relevant during the past decade, a period in which the rituals around commercial objects have become all the more pervasive and resolved in their choreographies...

Aside from functioning as a mild irritant (it's all too easy to read it as a typo), the ampersand legally appended to Iain Baxter's name serves a conceptual end by designating others as fellow authors of his oeuvre. For Baxter &amp;--a pioneering figure...

The Lisson Gallery turned forty this year, and in celebration its summer show explored the work of a new generation of (mostly European) artists whose practices are rooted in the Conceptual work that the gallery helped pioneer. Curated by Emily Pethick...

GLANCING THROUGH AN ENTRYWAY at Carlson &amp; Co. -- unmarked, save for a Warning: Eye Protection Required sign--was like peering through a Carrollian looking glass. Inside and to the right were jumpsuited workers hovering over an iridescent plinth...

For his first solo museum exhibition in Denmark, Jakob Kolding introduced new elements to his oeuvre. Alongside delicate drawings, posters, and collages, he added large lambda prints of digital collages and fragile, site-specific sculptures that employ...

What if several elite and prestigious landmark homes and apartment complexes around your city metamorphosed, suddenly and inexplicably, into blue-collar, working-class residences? Such was the premise of "Status L Phenomenon," Jana Gunstheimer's first...

Legal papers and surveillance cameras can be the stuff of messy divorces, but in the hands of Brooklyn- and Amsterdam-based artist Jill Magid, they become instruments for the expression of love--or something like it. Featuring various artifacts such...

At the opening of Jimmie Durham's "Templum: The Sacred, the Profane, and Other," the suffocating perfume of burning incense permeated the dark cavelike space at the gallery, furnished with natural and manufactured articles lifted from other contexts...

Artists willing to face the Herculean challenge of channeling the relentless deluge of photographic imagery face a profoundly modern futility: There's no possible way to manage the sheer overload. Nevertheless, in the catalogue for his current twenty-five-year...

In his 1969 text The world has too much art--I have made too many objects--what to do?, John Baldessari addressed the relationship between color and form, and sound and image, saying, "Collect old 45 rpm records of pop tunes with a color in the title....

Spanish artist Jorge Peris is a tenacious vagabond whose intense and personal approach stands out within a contemporary culture marked by rapid and prepackaged tourist consumerism. His projects are created during long sojourns, where he becomes involved...

Josephine Pryde's exhibitions always appear straightforwardly thematic, then become more and more perplexing the longer you think about them. Her recent show, "Hollow Inside," was no exception: Her new diagrams of yoga positions--in chains mounted...

IN MY OWN TAKE on the Grand Tour, I spent the summer sunburned in Los Angeles, reading poetry. The circulation of names and artworks and overpoliced critical shibboleths (see Texte zur Kunst's recent "Short Guide" for choice examples) that elsewhere...

Never before have I seen such an austerely conceptual exhibition with so few images and so much text that, at the same time, was imbued with such lightness, tenderness, heartfelt longing, imagination, and even humor. For her previous show in Munich,...

THERE WAS A TIME when Louise Nevelson's reputation far outshone that of the other Louise of postwar American sculpture: Louise Bourgeois. By the late 1960s Bourgeois still ranked as a minor scion of late Surrealism. In contrast, Nevelson had featured...

For the Hague- and Berlin-based artist Marcel van Eeden, it seems, the word death refers to the time before one's life as well as after its end. His "Encyclopedia of My Death" (as his body of work was once described by a curator--the name has stuck)...

"Feelings," British artist Martin Creed's first retrospective in North America, was noisy, chaotic, hyperactive, circuslike, funny, stupid, clever, provocative, elegant, and annoying--none of which qualities jibe with the sensitivity alluded to by...

IT IS RARE for a curator to reign with virtual sovereignty over an entire medium, but during his nearly three decades as director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modem Art in New York (from 1962 until his retirement in 1991), John...

"I heard her voice, dry as my own, thin, high, and in her nose, with the old outdoors and down the mountain sound to it," wrote Woody Guthrie in 1947. "Singing to us as she had sung into the rifle fire of Sheriff Blair's deputies, Sarah Ogan got the...

"His art is uniquely his own because it springs from his dreams." So claims the Metropolitan Museum of Art's introductory wall text for German painter Neo Rauch's recent exhibition "Neo Rauch at the Met: para," a show installed in the gallery where...

It is hard to believe that Nicolas Provost filmed the entirety of Plot Point, 2007, with a concealed camera on the streets of New York. The production value of the images and styling seems more like what you would see in a vintage Lynch film, and with...

The title of his recent exhibition, "The Collector," defines the creative process of the Berlin-based Portuguese artist Noe Sendas. Since the beginning of his career, in the mid-'90s, he has developed an oeuvre based on the politics of collecting....

AS A CITY, SHENZHEN was almost literally painted into existence. In 1979, "Deng Xiaoping drew a circle"--or so goes the cliche immortalized in an early-'80s pop song--around a fishing village abutting Hong Kong, and proclaimed a zone of free markets...

The phrase "Korean Modernism" has been unjustly burdened by its association with a series of overpowering, mostly foreign references, such as Monochrome, Informel, and Minimalism. The work of Park Seo-Bo is both a primary cause and the chief victim...

Whether by faking, borrowing, or stealing, artists today commonly produce works of art that employ the vocabulary of industry. This is not surprising if one considers the extent to which the broader contemporary language of form derives from the global...

RICHARD SERRA HAS BEEN HEADLINED in recent years by both the New York Times and the New Yorker as a "Man of Steel," and indeed, like Superman, he seems to be everything to everyone. The most eminent art historians have brilliantly analyzed his art;...

"Role Exchange," a group show exploring the theme of adopted personae in the art of the past three decades, demonstrated that an exhibition is not always greater than, or even equal to, the sum of its parts. If such were the case, this all-star lineup...

Though the pairing of Romanticism with Conceptual art is hardly common in art-historical writing, Conceptual art has long been misunderstood as a necessarily dry affair. Even Sol LeWitt, who famously stated in his 1967 "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"...

Rosalind Nashashibi represents Scotland in the Fifty-second Venice Biennale. She is currently participating in the third installment of the Contour Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium; has a solo exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum in California;...

"General Alert--Works, 1974-2007," the traveling retrospective of the work of Sanja Ivekovic (curated by Natasa Ilic and Kathrin Romberg), served to open one's eyes to the recent history of the former Yugoslavia. Ivekovic was a rare bird in the art...

Why bother to paint when one not only lacks the skill but also doesn't even seem to enjoy the attempt? The question invites a number of possible answers, several of which were on display in Scott Richter's recent exhibition, "Portraits: Based on the...

What better subject for a summer exhibition in a museum located near the picturesque Berkshires than the art of Spencer Finch, which deals in the observation of weather and natural light? Here, Finch shows four installations produced this year, two...

In her second solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Terri Friedman continued her exploration of fluidity as subject matter, subtext, and material property in a group of new paintings in transparent or translucent acrylic poured onto Plexiglas surfaces....

IN THE EARLY 1990S, Mexico City played the role more recently occupied by Berlin: peripheral to the art market, yet home to a vital, seemingly organic local art scene and inexpensive rents that drew an international crowd. The market follows the scene,...

What was once seditious is now ubiquitous. If ninety years ago Marcel Duchamp infamously claimed the products of industry as his own and a half century later Donald Judd furthered this scandal by directly co-opting the language of manufacture, today...

To chart the expanding parameters of fabrication today, Artforum invited curator Lynne Cooke, artists Angela Bulloch and Charles Ray, and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch to enter into a conversation with three leaders in the field of art production--Peter...

FEW ARTISTS have had Picasso's arrogant confidence: "I do not seek. I find." Far more typical of modernity was the desire to align one's work with research: Constable's cloud studies, Seurat's Chevreul-inspired pointillism, Kandinsky's work on synesthesia....

IN HIS SHORT ESSAY "The Storyteller," written in 1936, Walter Benjamin reflects on the impoverishment of soldiers returning from World War I, observing that they have "grown silent--not richer, but poorer in communicable experience." At the root of...

What to do, if you're a gallerist, when summer comes around? Throwing together a hodgepodge from the storeroom is always a popular option. Those with a little more ambition might attempt something hipper by engaging the services of a guest curator....

The photocopies strewn across the floor appeared to be left over from a demonstration. Behind them, fresh pages lay ready, sorted into eleven little stacks lined up along one wall. This was Leipzig Calendar Works, 2005/2007, and it sometimes came to...

Even before graduating from London's Royal College of Art master's program in 2004, Varda Caivano had been spotted by collectors, gallerists, and critics alike for her beautiful, small-scale, intensely painterly works. Caivano (born in Buenos Aires...

Exhibition titles are often little more than attention grabbers, but the name of Walter Robinson's recent show, "Represent," is actually of some use in pinning down the meaning of the work on view. This word has many definitions (among them "stand...

For perhaps four decades, William Anastasi has been a sort of New York art-world secret: a conceptual artist who in the early 1960s began to generate extremely original ideas that seemed to predict a range of later works by other artists but at the...

If any dispute has defined the short life of the Musee du Quai Branly, it has been the standoff between beauty and ritual, aesthetics and ethnography. Should sacred, functional, and ceremonial objects from the civilizations of Africa, Asia, Oceania,...

"Are you decorating a room? Building a library? Designing a theater or film set?" The Strand bookstore's website offers to help you assemble collections--overnight!--of books by the foot, arranged by binding material (antique leather or the winsome...